SCOTUS lets New Hampshire ban use of student IDs for voting

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a brief, unsigned order allowing New Hampshire to temporarily ban the use of student IDs for voting while litigation over the issue continues. The order keeps in place a ban passed by the state legislature earlier this year.

A federal judge blocked a state directive on how to enforce the ban, saying election officials couldn’t refuse to consider student ID cards as a backup form of identification. A federal appeals court declined to pause the judge’s order, but the Supreme Court’s ruling halted the block.

The justices said their decision was based on a legal principle that lower federal courts shouldn’t typically change election rules just before an election. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only one who dissented from the ruling. She wrote that the federal judge’s order was a targeted effort to correct misinformation rather than a change to actual state law.

Dig deeper: Read my report on the Supreme Court’s Wednesday refusal to stop free transgender procedures for prisoners while a lawsuit continues.